Monday, April 28, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...My uncle and he are perfectly agreed in their estimate of life, which, Quin says, would stink in his nostrils, if he did not steep it in claret.'

from Jerry Melford's letter to Sir Watkin Phillips, dated April 30, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Commonplace Book

'"They both belong to the same gang," said Uncle Matthew, adding rather wistfully, "we didn't have these gangs when I was young. Never mind, though, we had wars. I liked the Boer War very much, when I was Basil's age. If you won't have wars you must expect gangs, no doubt."

from Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 1)

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Well, there is no nation that drinks so hoggishly as the English. - What passes for wine among us is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making; yet we and our forefathers are, and have been, poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour. - The only genuine and wholesome beverage in England is London porter and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cider and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species...'

from Matt Bramble's letter to Dr Lewis, dated April 28, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a fable about the tyranny of beauty. Antony is married to Beatrice and they have a little girl child, strangely named Wonder. Antony is a sensitive artist type, trying to write. On a day in London, at Covent Garden, he finds in a shopstall a fascinating death-mask which shocks him with its resemblance to Beatrice. The shopkeeper tells him that it's the mask of a young woman who threw herself into the Seine. Bringing it home to the country, to Beatrice and Wonder, he finds himself utterly entranced by its beauty, and installs it in a little chalet in a wood next to their cottage which he uses as a writing retreat, hoping to find a muse for his work. Beatrice is disturbed by it and won't have it in the cottage. Antony is gripped. His imagination fired on all fronts, he begins what can only be descibed as a relationship with the Image; he senses that it is communicating with him and sees moods pass across and through it. It says that it is Silencieux, a kind of eternal spirit of beauty and inveigling fascination, which has commandeered and controlled men all through the ages, many of whom have died for it, and conversely benefited from its power of inspiration. In his rejection of all else around him and total concentration on Silencieux, Antony is the next of these. His work does improve, but his formerly loving connection to Beatrice and Wonder is gone. He has Wonder unwillingly kiss Silencieux to appreciate her beauty; she sickens and dies. This shocks and shames Antony out of his dream state, and he and Beatrice for a short period get away from their cottage, recover some balance in their grief, and find peace. Antony is astonished by who he has become, and is aware of Silencieux's sinister import. When they return to their cottage near the wood, he is determined to smash the Image. But he finds he can't, and decides to bury her instead. Here begins the final chapter. Her power is too strong. He digs her up and reinstals her in her former position in the chalet. Beatrice realises, heartbroken, that all is lost, that she no longer has any purpose in the world, hears the spirit of Wonder calling to her in the night near a black pond in the wood, and casts herself in. Antony, completely owned by Silencieux, is only slightly saddened by her death, and ponders quietly to himself how beautiful she looks with pieces of lily in her wet hair. He returns to the chalet, and in a short volcanic last paragraph, sees that the Image has changed - its mouth is open, and a death's-head moth sits inside! This is the most affecting Gallienne I've read thus far - he was a really good ideas-man. My former concerns about him still ring true - there is ultimately a bloodless quality to his work. Fascinating to consider what Wilde or Beerbohm would have made of this notion - the result could well have been a lasting classic. But in Gallienne's hands it is still remarkable.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Anyhow, he has made an escape. He has got out of reach, for the day, of that besetting malady of intricate civilisations - the want of a stirring visible relation between effort and result. A typical modern figure is the municipal Medical Officer who half thinks that his preservative work for the frail may only be compromising the future of the race. Matthew Arnold described it all, wailfully well, in his plaint about the way that we "each half-live a hundred different lives," strive without quite knowing what we strive for, and doubt and fluctuate and make fresh starts and then have fresh misgivings and nag and chatter and rant about ideals we do not live up to, until we "falter life away" with little done. At least for some eager and absorbed hours your true rambler has washed all that futilitarianism out of his soul and has started fair again in a heaven of simple effort and clear aim; a career in life opens before him at breakfast; success in life warms him at bedtime...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter X, Part VI)

The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna (1981)

What a fine thing this book is: by turns gutsy, fantastical and blackly funny. This story of a man in 1950s Finland who is, in today's parlance, probably bipolar, twists and turns in a delightful way. Huttunen is a miller by trade, and he has experienced Finland's strange and emotionally devastating gallop through the Second World War. There is mention early on of his wife dying in a fire somewhere in southern Finland which, with his sensitivities, could easily have further destabilised an already tense personality, let alone what the privations of the war may also have brought out. He heads north to the top of the gulf of Bothnia and a fairly backwoods region to start again, and finds a mill he can get working easily nearby a scanty village, surrounded by forest, swamp, and wild rivers. But his emotional pressures come out in uneasy ways, the most notable of which is a tendency to howl. He sounds convincingly wolf-like and scares the limited locals. Whilst they are warily welcoming to begin with, the howling and the extremities of his behaviour soon begin to tell in the opposite direction. A couple of the locals are a little more understanding, in particular a police constable, Portimo, and a "horticulture advisor", Sanelma Kayramo. She's a classic 50s Scandinavian creation: in an age of communal activity, and top-down jollying along to a better life, the Finnish state served up to its people admonitions and cheery encouragement in the bodies of these "advisors" of the better way. But she's also young, gorgeous, and very taken with Huttunen! This new personal war between the miller and his adopted locale takes some fantastic turns as he battles with pompous locals, bears with their prejudices pretty unwillingly, gets sent to a mental hospital, escapes to the woods and sets up camp, survives wild-man style. Our sympathy is always with him, but we can also see where he could have handled trouble a lot more diplomatically! There's also some brilliantly funny commentary on the lazy, deceitful, self-obsessed villagers, and some wacky situations arise where everything tumbles at cross-purposes. What a quiet, tongue-in-cheek, sly thing Paasilinna is - it's a wonder to me that more effort hasn't been made to render him into English, if this and it's only anglo compatriot, the classic The Year of the Hare are anything to go by - the French have a good twenty titles to choose from. Here's hoping the fresh English translations roll in soon.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Was not God created of all pure overflows of the human soul, the kind light of human eyes that not all the suffering of the world can exhaust, the idealism of the human spirit that not all the infamies of natural law can dismay?'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVII)

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...To be able to see - really to see - the whole of some great thing with the mind, at the instance of some fragment seen with the eye - this is a kind of success in life; and not for the man of science alone, who in presence of one small remnant of bone fossilised in a cave can see the whole of a monstrous bulk that wallowed in warm prehistoric slime, but for the artist, the traveller, the common man with all the common things about him. To graft upon the bodily sense of sight a special kind of imaginative energy, so that when the fit eye has gone as far as it can, its work is taken over and carried on without a break; so that, when later you try to remember, you cannot say where physical perception stopped and where mental vision began - all you know is that between them they have left you the memory of expanses greater than bodily eye ever saw, and also more urgently real than imagination alone could ever frame; this is the key of the garden..'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter IX, Part VII)

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore by George Sand (1858)

What a glorious feast. The difference of this one is its setting in time. All of the Sands I've read to date have been contemporaneous to her biography. This one is set right back in 1622, presenting a Sandian version of the times of The Three Musketeers, and concentrating in the main on the rebellion of the Huguenots. Sylvain de Bois-Dore, the elder of the two messieurs, is a scented and primped creature trying to retain his youth, but not at all effeminate. He is infatuated with the French classic pastoral romance Astree, and builds a fantasy of chivalry around it which completely permeates his life. His brother has been murdered in Spain in a mysterious way that he feels he can't get at or solve. The irruption into his chateau of a guest, d'Alvimar, presented by Sand almost as a kind of evil echo of Quixote, who has an offsider coincidentally named Sancho, precipitates a revelation and some tension. The revelation is that they may have been involved in his brother's murder, and the tension arises from the fact that they are fervent Catholics, whereas Bois-Dore is an ambivalent Huguenot who has taken on Catholicism to make things easy for himself. Suspicions arise everywhere. At the same time a group of Spanish gypsies visit the area. Bois-Dore is struck by the beauty and familiarity of one of the young ones, whose name is Mario. It is eventually revealed that he is the son of Bois-Dore's lost brother, and that the gypsies have the clue which reveals the culpability of d'Alvimar and Sancho in his loss. So, in the midst of political intrigue and secrets all around, this personal intrigue also comes to its climax, which is murderous and revengeful. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Mario, the now adopted younger messieur, and another guest of the chateau, Lauriane de Beuvres, who is an extremely young widow with fervent Huguenot credentials. Sand revels in all these strings of story, loving tangling them and then unravelling. Minor characters abound, lending humour, savagery, superstition, aristocracy and political angles. The landscape also plays an effectual part, with the Berry valleys, rivers, inns and chateaux bright in the piece. Not one, as I've said before, for lovers of tight singular plotting, but for lovers of a broad tapestry stitched in a thousand colours, perfect.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...All great natures are full of silence. Silence is the soil of all passion...'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter X)

Friday, April 11, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...joy will not have herself ordered about like mutton or coal, of which any rich person can get as much as he chooses to pay for: she shies away from blunt or importunate wooing. All the "beauty spots" of Europe have always been haunted by the dull faces of rich suitors who have estranged her. You meet them in every hotel that guide-books term "first-class"; the plaint they make aloud is commonly about the food, but what they really mean is that streams have run dry in themselves and the choric spheres have got out of tune.'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter VI, Part V)

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Some of the old writers write about Knowledge with passion, as lovers speak of a mistress. She is "divine"; to "woo" her is rapture; to win her is joy past words. That is the tone, and to the common run of our middle-class young to-day it must seem to be mere tall talking or gush. For they are out of it all; it belongs to a lost world which they are not even able to miss, they are so far from having entered it. Checked in their mental growth by dead mechanical teaching, bound over for life to remain overgrown dunces, tied down to second-rateness by many impressionable years of intimacy with mean valuations, what are the poor things to do? Some of them are brought, perhaps, by the more virile kinds of sport as near as they are likely ever to come to the thrill of the high adventures of the human spirit. Some others put up with such simulacra as dissipation affords of the most puissant emotions attainable by men. Some just eddy about in the eddying dust all their days, blown round and round by adventitious gusts of sentimentalism or of fashion.'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter V, Part VI)

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Things as they are" - the old phrase, no doubt is a trap. It implies some assumptions that seem to fade away into nonsense or nothing as soon as strict thought sets about its destructive work of analysis. Still, it may be used with due caution to signify those aspects of external things which fall under the jurisdiction of science rather than of art - all that can be measured, defined, referred to known causes and studied in its established effects. The phrase helps us to make clear to ourselves, so far as such clearness is not delusive, the distinction between our emotions and their objects, between our love and the beloved person, between fear and the enemy's attack or the storm's violence, between our own awe and the physical proportions of Westminster Abbey. Whatever philosophy may dissolve in the crucible minds of philosophers, we common people cling still to a working assumption that first there are things in existence outside our individual selves; that then we perceive them; and that, having perceived them, we then have, or may have, various feelings about them...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter IV, Part V)

Friday, April 4, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...The Swiss are inspired hotel-keepers. Some centuries since, when a stranger strayed into one of their valleys, their simple forefathers would kill him and share out the little money he might have about him. Now they know better. They keep him alive and writing cheques. He has risen in economic value from the status of a hare or a wild pigeon to that of a milch cow - or, at the lowest, a good laying hen. And, to keep up his average yield, they diet not only body but soul; they melt heart-strings and purse-strings alike with cheap and cheery semi-gammon about Prisoners of Chillon, Tell's apple, the jousting of cows for the championship of the pasture, the prevalence of ghosts on the Matterhorn, and so on, till the lapse of coin from the wandering alien becomes almost spontaneous...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter III, Part III)

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted face.

The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bed-time nests. When all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a bough on which already hung a little star.

Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the shadows and the toadstools and the silence."

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter I)

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (1870)

This is the first post beyond Broughton's inauguration, whose two books were so varied. In this, she settles for what may end up being her trademarks - a kind of youthful cheekiness, 1870s-style, which looks in the context of today like deeply conservative, almost classical elegance; and a tendency toward the celebration of the tragedy of death, a Victorian trait, which seems to act like an anchor, balancing her exuberance. Esther Craven is her young heroine here. She is spirited and intense, a poor yeoman farmer's sister, capable of being led astray minimally, but strong of mind. Her opportunities are typically limited by both her financial state and her gender. She is hounded into a partial promise to her farmer brother's friend 'next door', but feels trapped by it. On a visit to wealthy connections she meets huntin' shootin' fishin' St John Gerard, the heir to an estate, whose somewhat wily charms eventually capture her; she is also capable of refining him, to his surprise. Of course, propriety says that her prior agreement must be adhered to, but it was pretty conditional and she feels justified in herself in exploring the promise St John holds out. Unfortunately, when all is revealed, he doesn't feel the same, virtually accuses her of monstrous flirting, and she flees mortified at the pounding her reputation may suffer. The pretext for her fleeing is the illness of her beloved brother; he passes away. Esther is heartbroken, and also left without any means of support - as a typical Victorian girl, she has no means, or indeed the requisite knowledge, to continue the farm. In a slough of despond, it is sold, and Esther takes the only step she can in her situation - she becomes a companion to a wealthy, sleepy old couple on a rundown estate. The niece of these two is a former acquaintance who has had her beautiful but insipid eye on St John. On the rebound from Esther he has agreed reluctantly to marry her. Of course the niece visits her aunt and uncle and, unintentionally, Esther. Of course, St John comes to visit, too. And the rest is history, though there are some serious bumps on the road, and all is not settled until the very last chapter. Which, for Broughton, is saying something - this is her first conventionally happy ending; though she can't resist including in the last paragraphs the sad end of Esther's former affianced, who has died of a tropical fever in Bermuda with the armed forces, loyal to the last. The bounce of Broughton's cheekiness, from an 1870s point of view, is her significant charm. It will be interesting to watch what happens to it, if anything, as she ages and her career progresses.